RuleML Use Case NBBizKBThe New Brunswick Business Knowledge Base

Anna Maclachlan, Harold Boley, Marcel Ball, David Hirtle

Version History, 2004-02-27: First Version
Version History, 2005-07-02: Second Version

Version History, 2005-08-10: Current Version

NBBizKB is a real-world use case for RuleML knowledge bases.
Its facts have been created in a systematic manner using several
Metaxtract resources.
This has been interleaved with the engineering of the NBBizKB rules.

Contents

The New Brunswick Business Knowledge Base (NBBizKB)
is realized in Object-Oriented RuleML.
NBBizKB implements a
two-step design. First, facts are extracted from static CSV
tables and HTML pages. Second,
rules are developed to derive information implicit in the fact
base. Rule
derivation employs the Java-based RuleML implementation of Object-Oriented jDREW
to perform validation, business category mapping, and integration.
This application of
RuleML rules over RuleML facts for New Brunswick business
comprises both a regional e-Business case study and a use case
for Semantic Web rules.

NBBizKB is also significant as a use case for the XSLT-based upgrader stylesheets used to
automatically update existing (version 0.85+) RuleML knowledge bases to the most current version.
Presented here is a step-by-step trace of updating the NBBizKB knowledge bases
from RuleML version 0.85 to 0.89 by the sequential application of XSLT stylesheets. Note that this process
of "piping" the output of one XSLT to the input of another can be done automatically, e.g. with
a simple Java program.

NBBizKB was originally realized in
RuleML 0.85, the most current version at the time:

The subsequent version, RuleML 0.86, is syntactically
identical to 0.85, so translation isn't necessary. RuleML 0.87,
on the other hand, included significant syntactical changes (including case-distinguised Type/role tags),
all of which are performed automatically via the 0.87 upgrader XSLT with the following output:

Similarly, RuleML 0.88 included a number of
(mostly FOL RuleML-motivated) changes to the syntax, all of which
are handled (relative to the previous version, as always) by the
0.88 upgrader XSLT, yielding the following output: